About

Writer/student/wayward waitress/hedonist/flaneuse/enemy of small children. I want to be Claudia Wright when I grow up. other blog

Search for content

February 26, 2012
in auspol julia gillard gillard rudd kevin rudd spill leadership challenge leadership ballot 2012
Permalink »

Rudd, R-E-S-P-E-C-T and ALP in crisis

a pre-ballot sunday-night essay from a spectator

Anne Summers’ article in today’s Age drew attention to some of the more odious insults levelled at the Prime Minister. One caller to shock jock Alan Jones’ show sneered, ‘Does she go down to the chemist to buy her tampons or does the taxpayer pay for those as well?’ Another labelled her a ‘menopausal monster’. I don’t need to reproduce the article (you can read it here). The issue is not one of freedom of speech - it is one of respect. No male politician has ever been vilified in the way that Gillard has. No male politician could be, because equivalent insults simply do not exist for the male sex. It’s one thing to make fun of Howard’s eyebrows, or Keating’s antique clock collection, or Abbott’s penchant for Speedos. It’s quite another to politicise an individual’s choice to not have children, or their atheism, or to call your PM a ‘bitch’ or a ‘witch’ - words that have decidedly female connotations.

Female politicians are lumped into one of two categories. With few exceptions, they are either ‘iron ladies’ – hard-nosed, square-shouldered careerwomen who are subject to vitriol because they don’t match the 19th-century ideals of mellifluous, pillowy femininity – or worse yet, ‘not up to the job’ because they choose to juggle politics with something else - a baby, for instance. Crazy! Minister for Youth and Sport Kate Ellis was reviled for participating in a Grazia photo shoot, but Gillard is ‘barren’, a ‘frump’ whose hips are grotesquely caricatured on a regular basis. There was the furphy when Labor MP Kirstie Marshall breastfed her days-old infant during Victorian Parliament sitting in 2003, and a bizarre level of media interest when Penny Wong and her partner Sophie Allouache became parents to baby Alexandra. No matter how you look at it, Australian politics is still very much a boys’ club. And Kevin Rudd’s recent actions fit that mould perfectly. 

I should backtrack. When Julia Gillard seized office in the Great Spill of 2010, I was wary. I’d always had a soft spot for her, but I wasn’t quite convinced by the way in which Kevin had been given the boot. Perhaps I, like many others, was yet to hear the tales of his alleged temper tantrums and ostensibly draconian leadership style; perhaps I was merely softened by the sight of him, noble in defeat, humble and wet-eyelashed in his concession speech. Worrying, too, was the emphasis placed on her gender at the time. There’s a fine line between celebrating our first female PM, and having her sex become her defining characteristic. But we move on. Polls. An election campaign fought as a listless tug-of-war. A hung parliament. More polls. A carbon tax. An era in which each of the two major parties’ best asset is the other. Boredom. A limp, fuggy political tedium punctured briefly, once every so often, when Scott Morrison says something really appalling about asylum seekers, or when Bob Brown raises the question of same-sex marriage. 

But it is what it is. From 2010 right up until last week’s Q&A, the Liberals have capitalised on the murky nature of Gillard’s initial ascension to prime ministership, despite her head-down, bum-up approach to leading the nation and her evident capability in steering a minority government. The Libs haven’t once missed an opportunity to refer to Rudd’s ousting as a ‘knifing’ or a ‘stab in the back’. It’s the kind of bloody rhetoric that brings to mind Lady Macbeth - another Iron Lady, if you will. 

But the PM has handled herself with grace this week, which is more than can be said of Rudd, the Man Who Was Would Be Prime Minister. In this morning’s interview with Lawrie Oakes, Rudd played the martyr, claiming he was left ‘in a position where I had to resign’. It remains unclear exactly what forced him to step down and pull a press conference to announce his resignation - a curiously-timed press conference that took place in the middle of the night in Washington DC, where Rudd happened to be, but fell right into primetime Australian viewing. There is a fundamental incongruity in Rudd’s decision to abandon his post as Foreign Minister and hop a plane in order to defend ‘the interests and wellbeing of working people right across the country’. He claims to have learnt from the error of his old ways, to have shed the skin of his former rigid, overweening self, and yet he sees contesting the leadership as the only viable solution to the perceived problems dogging the ALP. He speaks of the interests of the nation, but seems to conflate them with interests of his own. 

And again, that lack of respect, that ugly sexism is bubbling to the surface. It sputtered every time Mr. Rudd referred to the PM as ‘Julia’, and fizzed with his constant, carefully-orchestrated references to ‘my family’ and ‘my wife’. His wet-lipped, paternalistic mewing over ‘working people right across the country’ was unconvincing. Megalomania simmered just beneath the tired rhetoric. Worse still was his inability to actually refute Oakes’ suggestions that he had ‘mocked’ the PM’s ‘We Are Us’ speech with journalists. When confronted about allegations that he had labelled Gillard a ‘childless, atheist ex-communist’, Rudd’s lethargic response was that he had no ‘recollection of having said anything of the sort […] Other people have said that about the Prime Minister’.

I think Gillard will hold her own tomorrow. Her legitimacy as leader has been disputed no end, but she has been gracious and steadfast amongst all the talk of Spill 2.0. Rudd has certainly done himself no favours over the last week. I’m scared the ALP might be headed the way of the Democrats, but until then, I’ll take a progressive, reform-focused Labor leader over Rudd any day.

Notes:

  1. badvelvet said: Please write long political pieces more often - that was a good read, seriously.
  2. monsterpussy said: 10/10! though I can’t see the ALP ever fading like the Dems.
  3. fuckyoumayaangelou said: so true
  4. acqua-profonda posted this